Shopping

I stayed up late the last couple of nights and finished off a feature on my deals site that I can no longer live without. I created deal agents (as I was writing code into the night, I seemed to waffle between "saved searches" and "alerts" so here is yet another term for the same thing). If you have an account on the site, you can now save a search as an alert which will e-mail you the results of your search whenever it matches some new deals. It's really useful for those items that have ridiculously low supply but which trickle out to stores from time to time (Nintendo, I'm looking at you). When I am in the market for such an item, I usually read about it being "in stock" on my deals site way too late. Sometimes these things go in less than 10 minutes. Never again though, because now I get an alert in my inbox as soon as everyone else knows about it.

Now I just need it to shop for me.

Which reminds me of an idea that I was pondering some time back. I was listening to NPR a couple of years ago and heard this story about people employing other people as professional purchasers. I can't find any references to the story now but the basic premise was that there are some people who really want something (usually an antique or fairly unique item) and they basically make a shopping list for these pro buyers. When the pros find an item, they buy it and sell it to their employer with some percentage markup. These were typically dollar-intensive items and therefore worth it for the pro buyers to seek out.

What I got to thinking about was: would people want this for cheaper items? And, is there any money in providing the meeting place for this kind of transaction? It's sort of like eBay, but the "sellers" don't actually own the item, yet. I invisioned two main types of transactions. First, as a buyer, you would list the things that you are looking for and what you would pay for one. This is analogous to the shopping list. Second, as a seller, you would find items that people want, go get them, and sell them to the buyers. Sellers might also want to list items that they know they can find, and what price they would sell them for. Buyers would then contract the seller to go pick one up and sell it to them. The site that brings this all together has a chance to earn money on each transaction, just like eBay.